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Fifty Shades of Grey and Why I’m Going to get Kicked Out of Book Club

My book club is reading Fifty Shades of Grey. Everyone I know on Facebook and Goodreads is reading Fifty Shades of Grey. Months ago one of the Pocahontas‘ suggested I read it and I dutifully walked into Barnes and Noble only to find that it was backordered.

And then I realized it was mom porn. I’m trying to figure out what the hell mom porn is. Is it a whole book full of husbands who take out the trash, play with the kids and then get bonus checks? Maybe mom porn is about a woman who works out all morning, lunches with friends and then has time to nap before picking kids up in her new Bentley SUV?

I want to know what Mom Porn is people!

So I downloaded a sample to my Nook and immediately recognized the fact that my girlfriends have lost their minds. Can you imagine hundreds of pages of this?

She hands me a security pass that has “visitor” very firmly stamped on the front. I can’t help my smirk. Surely it’s obvious that I’m just visting. I don’t fit in here at all. Nothing changes. I inwardly sigh. Thanking her, I walk over the bank of elevators and past the two security men who are both far more smartly dressed than I am in their well-cut black suits.

A page later:

She’s more nervous than me!

Really, that was the sentence.

Chapter two begins with:

My heart is pounding. The elevator arrives on the first floor, and I scramble out as soon as the doors slide open, stumbling once but fortunately not sprawling onto the immaculate sandstone floor. I race for the wide glass doors, and suddenly I’m free in the bracing, cleansing, damp air of Seattle. Raising my face, I welcome the cool, refreshing rain. I close my eyes and take a deep, purifying breath, trying to recover what’s left of my equilibrium.

I’m just not understanding what part of this is engaging. I know the ladies of facebook say, “it’s all about the sex”.

So, I’m supposed to read a horrendous plot so that I can get to the sex? Maybe the moms don’t need 50 shades and they should treat it just like any other porn and fast forward to the good part? I cannot bring myself to buy this book. It’s just ghastly looking to me. I wish I had an anonymous blog because I think book club will be pretty uncomfortable next month.

19 thoughts on “Fifty Shades of Grey and Why I’m Going to get Kicked Out of Book Club”

  1. I’m with you. I have enough trouble finding the time to read GOOD books, let alone this. (I thought book clubs were all about the cocktails?)

      1. I was having a hard time with it too after doing the download, and being on the rather heavy side with my reading lately… Then a friend got an email copy… which I may or may not read, but free is free. Would you like it?

  2. please tell me you’ve seen this site: http://50shadesofsuck.tumblr.com/

    dissenting opinion is what makes book club fun, right?? :) 

    1. And I am getting positively flogged on BlogHer for having the audacity to speak up about all the problems this book engenders for BDSM and for people trying it as a new thing. The irony is not lost on me.

  3. From everything I’ve heard about this book, it’s BDSM Lite for the Great Unwashed (vanilla female) Masses. I know several of them, to my consternation.

  4. So I read this monstrosity last year on “great recommendation” from a friend who I respected as a well-versed-in-literature type. 

    All I can say is that the very poorly written book made me feel really uncomfortable…on two very different levels. While as interesting as the first BDSM scene was to someone who has never explored that lifestyle, when the same scene is painted again using the same limited imagery, I felt I was doing my relatively intelligent brain a disservice by “reading in circles”. It felt like I was doing the porn thing in all the wrong ways. Like renting really shitty, low-budget porn and watching it on repeat. Ugh. It was bad. 

    Not to mention making my way TO the bad porn took a toll. 

    There’s just nothing really that great aside from erotic content you don’t typically see in the mainstream of erotic literature (if we can even really call this literature). It was based off of Twilight for the love of Pete.

  5. Ugh Jessica, my book club picked it too. Fortunately I have a friend who is loaning it to me so I don’t have to waste my money. I’ll read it, if only for the feeling of superiority over the bad writing. I figure at worst it will be a waste of time and at best it will a.) make me not care how tired I am and actually have sex with my husband rather than wishing I wasn’t too tired to have sex with my husband and b.) get off my lazy ass and finish editing my book and get it sold because if that shit can published certainly my shit can be published!

  6. If you want to know about S&M (that’s what this book is about, by the way), just get the Sleeping Beauty Trilogy by Anne Rice (under her pen name A.N. Roquelaure). I’m sure the writing and plot are much better in her books than this 50 Shades of Grey “novel”.

    And “mom porn”? Really? To me, “mom porn” is when my husband cooks and cleans for me. THAT turns me on every time.

  7. I keep wondering if I should *attempt* to read this just for the cultural-conversation factor, but almost every conversation about it that I come across convinces me not to–and the excerpts from the book totally reinforce that. Bad writing, terrible premise, and I’ve read much better sex scenes in books that didn’t purport to be “mom porn.” The fact that this started out as TWILIGHT fan fiction does NOT help.

    I’m not in a book club, but I could go for one that met at a diner.

  8. I, too, downloaded the sample. All I could think is “contrived.” I fully admit to enjoying a romance novel on occasion. I like those smutty and fun featuring people I’d want to hang around in real life. 

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